


Quarantined Secrets

by aderyn_merch



Category: Six of Crows Series - Leigh Bardugo
Genre: #sleep in his office instead, F/M, THERE WAS ONLY ONE BED, also Kaz swearing, because these are the Crows we're talking about, but they're both so traumatized, drinking tw, references to various past traumas, this is topical
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-13
Updated: 2020-03-13
Packaged: 2021-02-28 21:54:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,173
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23134237
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aderyn_merch/pseuds/aderyn_merch
Summary: It takes a lot to drag secrets out of Kaz. In this case, it takes a day quarantined in the Slat with Inej and a bottle of Brandy. It's cheaper than therapy.
Relationships: kanej
Comments: 5
Kudos: 123





	Quarantined Secrets

**Author's Note:**

> I am not trying to make light of the current state of affairs in way. I understand that the current pandemic is very real and dangerous to many people. I hope you are all staying safe, kind and healthy. It's just with everything closing I thought of Ketterdam and it's fear of contagion. And how it will continue to affect Kaz's mental state.

The four flights of stairs up to the attic of the Slat felt more painful today. Kaz’s leg had gotten stiff sitting behind his desk on the first floor. There was far less running around when you had an entire gang to do the running for you.  
He’d moved most of his business to the first-floor office that Per Haskell had used for years. But like any room, it leaked. He kept meaning to close up the air vent that went into the second-floor closet, and kept forgetting. He was pretty sure that Rosco hadn’t found it anyway.  
Still, any important business was done in his attic rooms. They leaked a little less.  
He’d have to do something about this Sheen Jauger. The Razorbills hadn’t been a true threat for years. They didn’t have the leadership for it. But this Jauger was young and smart. If something wasn’t done now, he’d get cocky. Kaz couldn’t allow that.  
What he needed was secrets. To know the exact spot to hit so that Jauger crumbled. And Rosco wasn’t getting the answers he needed. Inej would have.  
He kept telling himself there was a difference between want and need.  
He pushed open the door to his floor, letting himself rest. The late afternoon sun slanted through his window and onto the papers still cluttering his old desk. It was two in the afternoon and the Slat was slow. He could use a nap before night came and business picked up again.  
He shrugged out of his coat, and stripped off his gloves. He’d been trying to wear them less. He wasn’t exactly succeeding. He laid them on his desk and turned towards his bedroom.  
He froze. There was someone on his bed.  
Inej.  
She was curled up on her side, her arms tucked close to her chest. Her braid draped over her shoulders and down towards her stomach. Kaz couldn’t remember the last time he had seen her asleep.  
He was painfully aware of the last time he had seen her at all.  
Miraculously she hadn’t woken. And he considered simply lying down beside her. Not touching, just close enough to fall asleep to her breathing. Or he imagined running a hand down her braid, and resting a hand on her shoulder. How she would roll over onto her back and gaze at him, her dark eyes peaceful. There would be nothing to say and…  
Kaz shook himself. They were both too traumatized for that to become reality.  
Instead he walked over to his bed and crouched before her.  
“Inej,” he whispered.  
Now she woke. “Kaz–?” And then she sat up fast. “What time is it?”  
“Two,” Kaz said.  
Inej looked past him to the sun in the office’s window. “I didn’t mean to fall asleep,” she said. Her eyes found his again.  
“Is everything all right?”  
She nodded. “We’re just docked for supplies. I was going to spend the night at Wylan’s, but I wanted to stop in here first.”  
“I was in the downstairs office.” Kaz didn’t ask why she hadn’t come down there. Maybe she had. He was certain she had found the vent in the second-floor closet years before he had even known about it.  
“You’re always busy, Kaz.”  
Kaz stood, and walked back over to his desk. It was still stacked high with old ledgers and some new ones. The more sensitive of his business dealings. “You said you were just resupplying?”  
“Yes,” Inej had somehow followed him without him hearing it. “We’re to set out tomorrow afternoon.”  
Kaz glanced at the ledger for the fifth harbor trade. “Could you stay a little longer? I have a job for you.”  
Inej tilted her head to study him. “Can’t Rosco do it?”  
“He can’t get me the information I need. He’s tried.” Kaz sat at his desk. Inej stood before him, the afternoon sun putting her face in shadow and creating a halo in her hair. It was quite appropriate. “Apparently I need the best spider the Barrel has ever had for this.”  
Inej was still hesitating, “What are you–“  
There was a keening wail outside the slat. It grew in volume, shaking the window panes as it was taken up across the entire city. It wasn’t human.  
The plague sirens.  
Inej was kneeling on the window seat, staring down into the street below. Kaz scrambled to his feet and nearly ran to his door.  
“Rotty!” He yelled down the stairs. “Lock down the building. Figure out who’s here and who isn’t.”  
“Did you plan this?” Inej asked.  
It took a moment for the question to make sense to Kaz. “No. Stay here.” He headed down the stairs to take charge of his gang.

Inej waited. She watched from the attic window as the people of Ketterdam fled the streets. She debated if she should head back to her ship, or to Jesper’s house. But it was chaos on the street, and Kaz had told her to stay here. If she decided to leave later, she could travel along the rooftops. Quarantines were really only enforced if one was seen.  
She thought of all the people she had passed that day, at the docks and then walking the staves. Had she noticed anyone ill? She couldn’t have been infected, could she have? And if she was, had Kaz been exposed?  
Oh, saints, Kaz. He couldn’t stand other people’s sick beds. If he got sick…  
She shook herself and slid off the window sill. Kaz wouldn’t get sick. She wouldn’t either. This was probably a false alarm.  
Rather than continue to think, she went through Kaz’s desk.  
When he walked back through the door his mask slipped a bit, and she could tell he was relieved. Whether it was because she had stayed or because she didn’t appear sick.  
“Is everyone all right?” she asked.  
Kaz nodded. “The Crow’s Club has closed, and everyone who lives here is back here. No one appears infected. Yet.” He looked at the papers spread before her. “Find anything interesting?”  
“Why would you write me letters if you never sent them?”  
Kaz waved her off. He walked over to his wash basin and filled it. “They were thought exercises. Little else. And it is expensive to find a messenger I’d trust.”  
Inej gave him a soft smile. “I missed you too.”  
Kaz stopped, water dripping from his hands and face. He was still in his shirt sleeves, still without his gloves. Inej held his gaze until he looked away, reaching for a towel.  
“There’s food downstairs. We have enough emergency supplies to last us a week or more if we’re careful. You might as well go and eat.”  
Inej shook her head. “I was thinking that I should go to Wylan’s as planned.”  
“The city is quarantined, Wraith.” Kaz said. He still wasn’t looking at her.  
“I’d travel on the rooftops. I can’t stay here; my room is no longer mine.”  
“No,” Kaz grabbed his jacket and shrugged it on. “Stay up here. I have an office.” He started for the door.  
“Now you’re being ridiculous,” Inej caught up with him, almost grabbing his sleeve. “Your leg is already stiff–I can tell, Kaz. Sleeping in a chair or on the wood floor of your office won’t help. I can very easily make it to Wylan’s without being seen.”  
“No,” Kaz tugged open his door.  
“Kaz–“  
He slammed it shut again. “I am not,” he said through his teeth, “letting you out there when people are dying of the plague.”  
He moved to open the door again, but Inej grabbed the handle, and his hand around it. It took pushing with most of her body weight to keep it closed. Kaz’s breath had hitched when her bare skin came into contact with his, but he wasn’t letting go.  
“I’m not going to get sick,” she told him.  
“Don’t–promise me–that.” He yanked his hand back. The loss of an opposing force had her stumbling into the door.  
She looked up at Kaz. There was anger in his face, and if she were just a member of the Dregs that might be all she could see. But there was something else in his eyes, that she could see. Fear. And it was growing.  
She thought back to what little she knew about Kaz’s past.  
“Is that what happened to Jordie?” She asked quietly.  
Kaz was staring at her. He was breathing faster than he should have been. His face was colorless. She got the sense that she wasn’t what he was seeing.  
She remembered the incident in the prison wagon almost too late, but she managed to catch him around the waist so that when he fell he didn’t hit his head on the wall.  
“Saints. Kaz!” She shouldn’t be touching him. Not when he was like this. She stumbled back instead, then ran into his bedroom. She grabbed the still damp towel off the wash bin and ran back to him. She reached out to dab at his forehead, only for his hand to fly up and wrap around her wrist. The sleeve of her shirt separated their skin.  
“Don’t,” Kaz gasped.  
She put the towel down, and sat on the floor in front of him. He kept his eyes closed for a long time, breathing slowly. He was shaken, but more than that, she knew he was embarrassed. He couldn’t afford to look weak in front of most people. She was probably the only exception. But it still stung.  
At last he opened his eyes and looked at her. “That is how Jordie died.”  
She nodded.  
“Stay here. Please.”  
Inej looked down at her hands. “I will.” She met Kaz’s gaze again. “But I’m going to be the one sleeping in the office.”

Kaz spent the next day in his attic office. He cleaned off his desk. He compiled everything he knew about the Razorbills. Inej was beside him most of the day. He talked of the issue of Jaegur with her. He caught her staring out the window, over the rooftops of the Barrel.  
When Kaz had done everything he could think of doing from within his office, he sat back down at his desk. Inej was at the window again, eating one of the last pieces of bread they had.  
“Do you think the crows here remember me?” she asked. She was talking about the birds, not the people.  
“They do,” Kaz replied, finding the bottle of brandy he had stashed beneath his desk. “They just don’t know you’re here.” He thought for a second. “Does anyone else in the Slat know you’re here?”  
Inej just shrugged. She watched as he pulled a knife to break the wax seal on the bottle. Then he dug through more of his desk to find the cork screw.  
“Why not?” Kaz asked. He would have thought that she’d want to catch up with some of the people she had known here. But then, maybe they were painful memories she would rather not relive.  
“Because you’d know what they’d say, Kaz, if they knew I’d been hiding with you in this room for a whole day.”  
“They wouldn’t say anything,” Kaz set his corkscrew down on the table. “Fear is a wonderful tool. And I wield it expertly.”  
Inej sighed. “But they’d think it.”  
Kaz didn’t have an answer to that. He focused on getting the stubborn cork out of his bottle of brandy. He needed a drink.  
“Maybe no one would notice,” Inej said suddenly.  
“Unlikely,” Kaz said. He pulled the cork out with a satisfying pop.  
“No,” Inej said. “Notice that I can’t–that we can’t–“ She took a deep breath. Her eyes were fixed on the window, on the sinking sun caught within it. “Everyone knows about my time at the Menagerie. But nobody knows that you…” She didn’t finish. Just stared at her knees, which she held close to her chest.  
Kaz watched her. “That I can’t what?”  
She buried her face out of sight. “What happened to you, Kaz?” Her voice was muffled. She didn’t think she’d get an answer. She’d asked that before and he’d denied her. There was no reason why he wouldn’t this time.  
Kaz looked at the bottle in front of him. “Let me drink half of this first.”  
“You have to be drunk to talk about it?” She was stunned and wary.  
“No,” he said. “But I’d prefer to be.”

“Pekka Rollins scammed Jordie and I out of all the money we had. We were young and stupid and our parents were dead.”  
Kaz was sitting on the floor now, leaning against the wall. The room was dark. Inej was stretched out of the floor, her head pillowed in her arms, listening to Kaz’s voice. It was unsteady as it tripped along.  
“We ended up on the streets when the Queen’s Plague hit. Jordie got it first and then I did.” There was a pause as Kaz lifted the bottle again. “We were both picked up by the Bodyman. Put on a Reaper’s Barge. Jordie was dead. I wasn’t.”  
There was a long silence. Kaz was struggling to breathe.  
“They were everywhere, Inej. Beneath me, beside me, on top of me.”  
He meant the corpses. He had been flung among the pile on the Reaper’s Barge.  
Kaz took another drink.  
“I couldn’t make it all the way back into the harbor myself. So I took Jordie…I” Another pause another drink. “Dead bodies float.”  
He didn’t say anything more. Inej tried to envision it and shivered. The bloated bodies, the dark cold sea. No wonder Kaz couldn’t stand the touch of skin.  
“How old were you?” She asked, quietly. She didn’t expect an answer.  
“Nine.”  
Inej close her eyes. She tried to remember being nine, but knew that all she’d have from that time were happy memories. Time on the high wire and trapeze. Her mother’s voice and her father’s smile.  
“It got worse over time,” Kaz said. “Touching skin. I didn’t have to hide it for years.”  
Inej thought of Kaz’s hands. They were covered by their gloves now, but they had been bare before. This morning and yesterday. “You’re fighting it,” she said.  
“And as yesterday showed, I’m progressing at a reasonably fast pace.” The sarcasm was as thick as the alcohol in Kaz’s voice.  
“Kaz–“  
“I’ll never be the man you want me to be, Inej. Fuck, I can’t even be the man I want to be.”  
Inej sat up. “Self-deprecating isn’t a good look for you, Kaz.” Kaz scoffed.  
“I’ll pull myself together,” he said. He tilted his liquor bottle. “Tomorrow.”  
Inej pulled the bottle from his hand without resistance and put it behind her. “You can’t just expect yourself to… I mean, I can’t even imagine what that was like. I doubt most people would have even lived through that. Fighting that fear will take time, but you’ll conquer it, Kaz.”  
He was looking right at her, surprisingly close in the darkness. He smelled of brandy and coffee and the dust of the attic. “And what about your fears, Inej Ghafa. Have you conquered those?”  
She closed her eyes. Thinking of phantom hands on her bodies, a locked cabin door. The blood beneath her feet and on her body. Being torn open and cast aside time after time until she became a shell, filled with only one bloody purpose.  
She hated what she had been forced to become sometimes. But was she afraid anymore?  
Kaz was watching her. His gaze was heavy. He was so close.  
She was afraid. She was afraid that if she kissed him, she wouldn’t stop. That she would push him beyond where he was able to go and lose him. That she would tear apart his careful reputation of being untouchable, make his weakness for her a target big enough to be seen by the entire world.  
She was afraid that someday she would want him more than she wanted his safety.  
“I’m not afraid of what I once was,” she said at last. “But that doesn’t mean I don’t have fears.” She opened her eyes. Kaz gave her a broken smile.  
“Fear is a phoenix,” he said. “Isn’t that something Nina said once?”  
“I thought you hated pithy quotes.”  
Kaz reached out. He took her braid in one hand, and ran his fingers over it, slowly. “I always value your–“  
There was a knock at the door, and Rosco stuck his head in. “Boss, the stadwatch–“ his words choked his throat.  
Kaz had not gotten up. He was glaring up at Rosco with the look that usually precluded a murder. “I was under the impression that one was supposed to wait for a response to a knock before entering the room?”  
“Sorry, Boss,” Rosco was shaking. He was trying not to look at Inej. Kaz continued glaring.  
“I’ll just… I’ll…” Rosco gulped.  
Kaz sighed. “You’ve already interrupted. You might as well tell me why.”  
“Oh. Um. The, yeah, the stadwatch came by and said that it was a mistake. Some medik messed up. There’s no plague. Quarantine is done.”  
Kaz pushed to his feet. Perhaps only Inej could tell how hard he was trying to hide his drunkenness. “Get the Crow club open then. We’re lost too much business already.”  
“Yes, sir, I’ll just…” Rosco cut another glance towards Inej.  
“Speak to no one about this.”  
“Right. Exactly. I’ll get right on that.” Rosco made a hasty retreat.  
Kaz leaned against the wall, pinching his forehead with one hand. Inej got up to quietly close the door.  
“I am so drunk,” Kaz said quietly. “I should not be this drunk.”  
Inej picked up the bottle. It was significantly lighter.  
“Don’t tell me this is my own doing,” Kaz said. “I know that.”  
“I was going to ask how you are still standing.”  
Kaz put his back to the wall and slid down until he was sitting again. “I’m not.”  
He looked up at her, the edges of his expression softer than usual. “I suppose  
you’re going to Jesper’s now?”  
“I’m not sure leaving you here like this is responsible.”  
Kaz waved her off vaguely. “I’ll just sleep it off.”  
“Kaz.”  
“Do you think he noticed that I’m drunk?”  
“I think he was distracted.”  
Kaz tilted his head back against the wall. “Do you think he’ll talk?”  
“Definitely.”  
“I’ll threaten him again tomorrow then.”  
Inej stepped forward carefully. “I’ll help you up.”  
“I’m fine.” Kaz pushed himself to his feet again. He made his way to his  
bedroom with surprisingly steady strides. He stopped at his bed and looked back at her. “Haven’t you left yet, Wraith?”  
She rolled her eyes, even though she wasn’t sure he could see. She pulled his coat off its hanger and headed for the window.  
“I saw that.”  
But when she looked back he was lying on his bed, eyes closed.  
She gave him one last smile, before slipping out the window and into the night.  
She’d return the coat.  
Maybe.


End file.
